With the announcement of Fidel Castro's ambiguous "retirement" from government, the time is ripe for research and rediscovery into the strange recent history of Cuba and its revolution. One touchstone in that history, and one of the oddest great movies ever made, remains I Am Cuba, which, thanks to a happy stroke of timing, was recently issued on DVD in a dandy box set from Milestone Video that includes a couple of extra discs of supplementary materials (including the feature length making-of documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth), handsomely packaged in a cigar box. The movie itself was made in the early 1960s by a filmmaking team headed by director Mikhail Kalatozov. Kalatozov, who had enjoyed one of the major international successes of post-Stalin Russian filmmaking with the 1957 patriotic love story The Cranes Are Flying, was literally a man on a mission: I Am Cuba was conceived by the Soviet Union and the Cuban government as a joint project that would result in a movie that would not just make the case for Castro's revolution but also help it to spread. The idea was that the film's exciting fusion of visual dazzle and firebrand propaganda would light in a fire in the heart of everyone who saw it, and revolution would break out all over the globe. Boy — the sixties, you know what I'm saying?

The fact that I Am Cuba can now be purchased as a consumer durable in a decadently attractive package is one clue that it failed in its higher historic mission. Fortunately, there are other standards by which a movie can be judged besides its success rate at overturning the worldwide capitalist system. The filmmakers had all the funding and official assistance they could ask for, and they availed themselves of it, big time. They were given plenty of time and resources in order to experiment, so that they could pull off such coups as the movie's celebrated long, long continuous shot that begins with images of a beauty contest being staged high up in a Batista-era luxury hotel and tracks down to the swimming pool area, and follows a woman underwater as she dives in. (P. T. Anderson included a homage to the shot in Boogie Nights.) The multipart story is your basic simple-minded political cartoon about the exploitation of the island and its people, back in the bad old days, by high-rolling gringos smoking cigarettes and wearing out their Men-in-Black sunglasses. In the first part, these good-for-nothings ply native women with the demon rum and force them to hit the dance floor and listen to the jazzy rhythms of the house band, which dangerously loosens their morals and hip joints. This is followed by the story of an old sugar-cane farmer who sets his crops and home on fire rather than let them fall into the hands of the capitalist vultures. The story material in I Am Cuba is today of interest only as political kitsch from another era, but the extraordinary visual energy and imaginative beauty transforms the material. When the farmer lights up his fields, the black smoke that fills the sky is like an apocalyptic vision from a science-fiction movie. It's too amazing looking to pass for something that really happened so that a film crew could photograph it.

I Am Cuba never really got the chance to demonstrate its revolutionary potential, if any. After its much-ballyhooed 1964 premieres in Moscow and Havana, the two governments slunk away from it. Cuban audiences thought that it was a silly, alien vision of their culture, and Soviet leaders were concerned that it made capitalist hedonism look a little too inviting. Kalatozov didn't get to direct again until the 1969 adventure film The Red Tent, which turned out to be his last film; he died in 1973. It wasn't until twenty years later, with the Iron Curtain a fading memory, that I Am Cuba was rediscovered through the efforts of some enterprising festival programmers, Milestone distribution, and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who lent their names to the promotional efforts when the movie was "re-released" — actually, in the West, released for the first time — in 1994. Years after that, the documentary crew that made The Siberian Mammoth hit the island and tracked down some of the surviving Cubans who worked on the movie, who, if they'd thought about I Am Cuba at all since 1964, had done so under the impression that they'd spent those years working on what turned out to be the Cuban-Russian equivalent of Howard the Duck in terms of critical respect. One of them, handed a video of the movie, turns it over in his hands and gazes at it quizzically. Finally he mutters, "Scorsese had something to do with this?"